We spent 20 years propping the government / military up. It seems like the Taliban has a monopoly on "competence" and resolve in that country; unfortunately they also don't seem to share our basic ideals or value people very much (particularly women).

We're on to our 2nd presidential administration in a row where we have very good reasons to question competence here as well... It will be interesting to see how long we can ride the position our parents and grandparents created for us (probably a while), but we've been swinging and missing in a number of important areas over the last few years (the one bright spot was the COVID vaccine mobilization efforts, and we fucked that up in the end too).